Since his victory over the coup makers two weeks ago, the president of the Russian Republic has displayed a flair for highhanded gestures, issuing orders to and for the national government. As the old Soviet empire crumbled, Yeltsin seemed ready to remake the union in Russia’s image. He staked a claim to the seat of power in Moscow. “The Kremlin is the property of Russia,” he said, “not of ’the center’.” A statement issued in his name also warned that breakaway republics should not expect to take large Russian populations with them: borders would have to be redrawn. When Nursultan Nazarbayev, the influential president of Kazakhstan, heard about Yeltsin’s pronouncement on rearranging borders, he told reporters: “Well then, that’s war. That’s civil war.”
In the space of a week, the headstrong Yeltsin had gone from liberator to bully in the minds of many people, accused by his critics of using “Bolshevik methods” to amass power. The euphoria that greeted the failure of the hard-line coup was replaced by an apprehensive new mood. “It’s a shame that, at the very start, such a fine chance has been lost, and the seeds of mistrust have been sown,” said Nazarbayev. “Our time of troubles is not over.”
By last week, the Soviet Union was in a perilous state of crackup. The old union had become so weak, so disunited, so potentially chaotic that even earnest democrats began to yearn for a firm hand. Already many foreign nations had recognized the three tiny Baltic republics as independent countries. Because the 12 remaining republics cannot stand alone, or may prefer not to risk it, their leaders had to grope their way toward a new union-or unions.
Russia, by far the largest and richest republic, would inevitably dominate any new arrangement. “Russia will be dictating to the republics, and not vice versa,” said Leningrad’s Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, a rising star in the post-coup firmament. “That is what they have to realize.” But they didn’t have to like it. Stung by criticism of his headstrong comments, Yeltsin backed off a bit, sending emissaries to mend fences with the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. He insisted that he wants to “create a new, really free, really voluntary union of sovereign and, I stress, equal states.” Yeltsin envisages a confederation of sovereign states with broad rights of self-government, presided over by a shrunken central government with limited economic and military functions.
Clinging to what remained of Soviet central authority, Mikhail Gorbachev offered an alternative vision of his own. The Soviet president argued eloquently, but probably in vain, for the preservation of something more like the old Soviet Union. Its collapse, he warned, “threatens the lives and property of millions of people and the defense potential of our country, which is a superpower. We do not have the right to make a mistake of this proportion.” Saying he had learned his lesson from the coup, he promised to seek “a renewed union, a reformed union” and to resign rather than “accept anything else.”
Gorbachev may be a hollow political shell in the eyes of the Russians, but to some in the republics he was re-emerging as a useful counterweight to the impulsive Yeltsin. “A lot of republics would prefer to see Gorbachev in charge of the center,” conceded Sergei Stankevich, a senior Yeltsin adviser and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature. “They are afraid of Yeltsin’s Russia.”
George Bush and several of his top advisers continued to favor Gorbachev. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney argued on a Sunday talk show that Yeltsin was “far more friendly to our principles” than Gorbachev, a view that Vice President Dan Quayle was said to share. But Bush, Secretary of State James Baker and national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft were not convinced that Yeltsin truly believes in democracy or a free market. Although they acknowledged his political skills and personal courage, they thought they detected demagoguery in the man, and they suspected that he was pursuing a democratic line only because it “fits the moment,” said a senior administration official. As a result, the administration was careful to do nothing that might further weaken Gorbachev, delaying the scheduled U.S. recognition of Baltic independence.
But despite that show of support, the institution over which Gorbachev presided was effectively defunct. “The center is dead, the center committed suicide,” said Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan. Gorbachev could have the rest of his tattered authority taken away from him as early as this week, when the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national super-Parliament, holds an emergency meeting. Conservative Communists still dominate the Congress, and it is possible that they might vote their former party leader out of his last remaining office, or force him to contest a national election that he probably cannot win. Last week, according to one legislator, Gorbachev himself described the impending session with one word: “strashno " (frightening).
As the empire spun apart, Soviets and outsiders alike contemplated disaster scenarios. Economist Yevgeny Yasin, a member of the committee that Gorbachev appointed to reform the economy, predicted that inflation in the coming year would run at about 1,000 percent. Soviet cities could run short of food next winter; of the 85 million metric tons of grain required for urban supplies, only 25 million tons have been purchased so far from Soviet farms. U.S. intelligence officials warn that the Soviet bureaucracy could collapse, impeding all government functions, including food distribution. They also predict that organized crime will run rampant in Soviet cities while the KGB and local police are on the ropes. “When fear of authority breaks down, crime goes up,” says one source, noting that Eastern Europe had the same problem when its Communist police services were dismantled. At the far end of the doomsday scale, U.S. officials warned of a danger that Soviet nuclear weapons or nuclear know-how might fall into irresponsible hands (page 35).
There was no shortage of ideas for how to revamp the union. For Slavic nationalists, the Soviet crackup is the opportunity to fulfill an old dream: a Pan-Slavic union built around the Slavs’ ethnic heartland, shorn of poor, dependent Asians and of pesky secessionists such as the Baltic republics. Such a union would be based on the three predominantly Slavic republics-Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine, which together account for 80 percent of the Soviet Union’s territory and 211 million of its 290 million people. Other republics might join the new federation, but they would have to do so on Slavic terms. The new union dominated by Slavs might not be entirely democratic. The Ukraine and Belorussia are still ruled by their old Communist apparatus, now suddenly decked out in nationalist garb; Ukrainian leader Leonid Kravchuk unabashedly admits that he was a Communist “until Aug. 19,” the day the coup began.
A Slavic confederation might not be the only new alignment to emerge from the Soviet wreckage. Some republics, such as Georgia or Armenia, might choose to go it alone, despite the odds against their viability. Moldova (known until recently as Moldavia) might decide to merge with its relatives in neighboring Romania. And some or all of the Islamic republics could go their own way or set up their own union, with a potential population of 60 million people. In the volatile Middle East, the Soviet Union’s former Muslim republics could be a battery of loose cannons. Oil-rich Azerbaijan, which last week became the eighth republic to declare independence, has long wanted to unite with its fellow Shiites across the border in Iran, an amalgamation that Moscow would probably resist. Some in the West worried that the Kazakhs might conceivably take a small piece of the Soviet nuclear arsenal with them, at last confronting the world with the long-dreaded “Islamic bomb.”
To calm Ukrainian fears of resurgent Russian chauvinism, Yeltsin sent a delegation to Kiev. The result was an agreement that looked a lot like a treaty between independent nations. It called for the creation of “temporary interstate structures” between the two republics and said they would work for “democratic transformation” and “radical economic reforms.” The two republics recognized each other’s borders and agreed to share control over Soviet military units in the Ukraine, including nuclear forces. The agreement left Gorbachev, the nominal commander in chief of Soviet military forces, entirely out of the equation. Its stated objective was not to shore up the existing union but merely to prevent “uncontrolled disintegration.” It said Russia and the Ukraine were ready to form a new relationship with other republics of “the former U.S.S.R.” Even that was too restrictive for some Ukrainians. “The Russians got much more out of this than we did,” complained Oleksander Savchenko, the chief economist for the Ukrainian nationalist organization Rukh. Rukh issued a denunciation of Russia’s “imperial aspirations” and “older-brother syndrome.” In Kiev, graffiti artists scrawled RUSSIANS GO HOME on the walls.
Disgruntled Kazakhstan also flexed its muscles. Having declared itself a nuclear-free zone, it shut down the Soviet atomic-testing facility at Semipalatinsk. The Kazakhs had previously opposed the idea of separate republican armies, but by last week Nazarbayev was having second thoughts. “Russia’s going to have an army, and the Ukraine has declared that it will have an army and Belorussia will have an army,” the Kazakh leader told reporters in Moscow. “And what will poor Kazakhstan do without one now?”
Yeltsin dispatched his goodwill delegation to get the Kazakhs back into line. The two republics reached an agreement that confirmed mutual borders, called for “strengthening of the rights of sovereign republics” and proposed again to prevent the “uncontrolled disintegration” of the union. Whether that would do the trick remained to be seen. Nazarbayev warned that Kazakhstan would not be “anybody’s little brother.” He refused to concede Russia the status of “first among equals.” And when it was suggested that a new Soviet vice president (replacing plotter Gennady Yanayev) might come from Central Asia, Nazarbayev remarked: “Well, thanks a lot.”
Meanwhile Gorbachev wasn’t making much headway in his own efforts to hold the union together. After escaping the coup, he appointed a committee headed by Ivan Silayev, the prime minister of the Russian Republic, to draw up yet another plan for reforming the Soviet economy. Gorbachev said he was committed, at long last, to rapid reforms that would give “land to all those who want to work on it” and “full freedom for entrepreneurship.” But with all the uncertainties facing the union, the economic-reform committee seemed to be spinning its wheels. “There is no time for any long-term programs at the moment,” said economist Yasin. “The main task is to stabilize.”
Gorbachev also called for the creation of a new Security Council to make key decisions on governing the country until a new constitution is adopted and national elections are held. Its specific responsibilities would include defense and law enforcement. To serve on the body, he nominated the leaders of the nine republics that agreed to a new union treaty, which was supposed to have been signed at the time of the coup. Both the Security Council and its membership were subject to confirmation at this week’s problematic session of the Congress of People’s Deputies. To increase the appeal of the ideas, Gorbachev wanted to appoint some key progressives, including Eduard Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister who broke with him last year (page 30). But Shevardnadze and the others turned him down. And his union treaty was in limbo, awaiting renegotiation if it is not scrapped altogether.
Whatever becomes of Gorbachev or Yeltsin, it won’t be easy for the republics to sever abruptly the web of accumulated common interests that still bind them together. They will have to work with one another on what to do with the Soviet armed forces, the only nationwide power that has been left relatively intact now that the Soviet Communist Party has been suspended and the KGB has been defanged. Much of it now may be either demobilized or transformed into the Russian armed forces. Separate militias will probably be created in the other republics. But those republics presumably will want a voice in the future of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, even though all or nearly all of the weapons will end up on Russian soil. Some sort of shared control is likely. “They will belong to everyone and no one,” says Oles Tanyuk, a democratic Ukrainian politician who helped to negotiate last week’s agreement with Russia.
Economics also will exercise a centripetal pull on the republics, although most of the cohesion comes from chronic weakness and mutual dependency. Even a republic like the Ukraine, which is strong in both agriculture and industry, relies heavily on the rest of the country for parts, raw materials, petroleum products-and captive markets. “If the Ukrainians suddenly have to pay world prices for resources and the machinery made from them, they are going to take a tremendous hit,” says a senior U.S. Treasury expert on the Soviet Union. “And if they are forced to sell their wheat on world markets, they’ll be competing against the North American agricultural community, plus the highly subsidized European one.”
The republics are effectively trapped in a common market-albeit one defined by mismanagement, subsidized inefficiency and shared backwardness. “Our entire industry is obsolete,” says Rein Otsason, head of Estonia’s national bank. “What can we sell abroad?” Russia, by far the strongest partner, buys uncompetitive goods from the others and sells them necessities at below-market prices. Western studies show that if all the products made by each republic were priced at world levels, Russia’s income from internal trade would increase by 5 to 10 percent. Except for oilproducing Azerbaijan, which would just about break even, all the others would lose. Economically, the other republics need Russia more than Russia needs them. That hard fact could give Yeltsin the leverage he needs to crown himself king of a new kind of Russian empire.
